


Dear Diary, The Future Sucks, Love Steve

by Kari_Kurofai



Category: Captain America (2011), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: A lot of metaphorical deep meaning like whoa
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-06
Updated: 2012-04-05
Packaged: 2017-11-03 03:14:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kari_Kurofai/pseuds/Kari_Kurofai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little set of diary-style drabbles that have been sitting around on my computer for months. I might finish them off after the movie comes out, but WHO KNOWS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This Isn't A Journal

Dear Diary,

They say that writing down everything that happens to me will “Honestly help.” I don’t think they know what they’re talking about. Clint says diaries are just little things with pink glitter teenage girls hide their secrets in. I’m not sure he understands that people had diaries back then, too. I know what a diary is.

I know what a journal is. Journals are where war heroes recount their tales of battles won. They’re books scientists fill with scribbled notes and chemical stains. Journals are compilations of paper speaking of what we know and what we’re trying to understand and discover.

Diaries are for secrets.

What’s the point of writing down everything that happens to me when my whole life has already been printed out in comic panels? They’re inaccurate, by the way. I don’t have the heart to correct them though. What’s the point of telling them that Bucky was six foot two? What’s the point of describing to them that Peggy’s hair was six different shades of brown and auburn in the right light, not blond. 

Clint showed me a few of his collection and I didn’t even point out that they never once mention my name.

I’ve been brushed over with red, white, and blue until the world has forgotten that there ever used to be a living, breathing human being under the cowl.

Journals are for facts everyone already knows.

Diaries are for secrets we haven’t told yet and probably never will.

So, dear Diary, I’ll tell you.

The future sucks.

Love, Steve


	2. The Traveler

Dear Diary,

I read a book once, a long time ago now, about a man who traveled through time. When I was reading it I found it fascinating, the idea of moving through time as if it was as easy as driving a car down the road. The Traveler could go back whenever he wanted, simply put the gears in reverse and be home by dinner. 

“How exciting it would be,” I’d said to Bucky, “To see what the future is like and what has become of humanity thousands of years from now.”

Bucky had wanted to go see dinosaurs instead. 

But I wanted to be the Traveler. I wanted to see what no one else around me had seen yet, what no one had imaged, even. It seemed like an adventure to me because the Traveler was back in time for dinner, wasn’t he. He was never truly gone.

I guess I’d forgotten that at the end of all of it the Traveler says he’ll be right back. Just a quick little trip, he says. A journey that for everyone else will only seem to take half an hour.

After three years they realize the Traveler is never going to return.

I wonder how long it took them to know the same about me?

Did they know when I was late that next Saturday? Sometimes I think about the dimly lit club, Peggy sitting on a barstool with a drink in hand, asking the bartender to just give her ten more minutes. “He said he’d be here,” she’d say. By then they’ve already announced Last Call three times.

Did they know when I failed to show up like I had the first time, smiling, knowing I’d succeeded, standing tall because I’d finally done something I was proud of?

Did they know when they finally slipped a short, bold red Missing In Action announcement into my file?

Did they know when they had to bury an empty coffin? Maybe they laid flowers on my grave and told the world, “He’s just a little late. You’ll see.”

Or did they know right away, the second the plane hit the ice and snow and I didn’t, couldn’t, explain anymore how I was afraid I’d step on Peggy’s feet.

I wonder if she went to the club that next Saturday anyways, knowing all the while I wouldn’t be there.

It took three years for people to give up on the Traveler ever returning. I hope they did not wait even half as long for me.

Love, Steve


	3. The Man Who Cried Wolf

Dear Diary,

I don’t know what I expected. Actually, I didn’t expect that at all. Not even a little bit. Clint laughed, by the way. He said he should have warned me better, had forgotten that I wasn’t from “Around here” and that everyone except me just kind of . . . Knew. 

Proper introductions aside, I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean. How do you just “Know” about Tony Stark?

Colonel Fury apologized to me, told me he should have given me a debrief about Mr. Stark. I’m not sure if that would have been better or worse. What’s worse, do you think? Sticking your head in a beehive knowing that it’s full of bees because you read about beehives and bees in a book, or sticking your head in, having no clue what you’re getting into, and deciding what to make of the situation yourself. If you know about bees beforehand, have had friends tell you you’re going to get stung, you see the bee only for its stinger. If you know nothing about bees you see the colors first, the blacks and the yellows and the wings and the little bits of pollen that are not parts of the bee but rather the stuff that sticks to it after a lifetime of work. The sting hurts a little less, I think, when you’re not expecting it. It’s certainly more of a shock that way, but if you spend your time in the beehive wincing, flinching, waiting for the bees to sting you it just smarts more at the end of the day.

He’s not like his father. 

That was my first thought. He looks like Howard, a bit, if he tilts his head just so and stands in the right light, but not really. He’s harsher, somehow, more worn down and withdrawn despite his snide remarks and cold smiles. If I let myself remember, I’d say he reminds me of older soldiers in the war, the ones who had been fighting the longest. He wears a façade of easy smiles and overconfidence into battle but when his back is turned I’m sure he’s made up of other things. 

Except I didn’t really get the chance to try and see that, did I. It’s half my own fault, I suppose, no one can shoulder the entire burden of the blame, so it’s just as much my fault as his. I was surprised by him, startled at his brash attitude and refusal to be civil. “Big man in a suit of armor,” I said to him, “Take that away and what are you?”

“Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist,” he’d sneered. 

I remember the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. He piled on lie after lie after lie and in the end it cost him dearly. Mr. Stark is the same, I think, in some ways. Except he’s not so much stacking on the lies for attention as much as for defense. He wears them thicker than his armor, I could see it in his eyes. The Boy Who Cried Wolf was punished, in the end, for his lies because he’d used them for attention.

If you build up an armor of lies rather than use them for a spotlight, I wonder, would you be crushed under them?

Love, Steve


	4. Timeline

Dear Diary,

Natasha took me out for lunch today. She said to call her Natasha after I politely addressed her as Ms. Romanov. And I’m scared she reads this, somehow, considering our topics of discussion. So I will also be writing her name as Natasha.

First, I should note that the one thing about New York that has not changed is their pizza. Thank god. Natasha took me to this nice little place near the park that had good, greasy, probably a heart attack disguised as a delicious Italian god on a plate pizza. I had twelve slices, which Natasha later informed me was technically a whole pizza. Whoops.

Anyways, we talked. When I met her I hadn’t pegged Natasha down as a good listener so much as a good listener who, once the information was received from her captive, killed the speaker and left before he even started bleeding. If she does read this, I’m pretty sure she’d take that as a compliment. 

I let it slip that she reminded me of a bit of a scarier version of Peggy. I thought she was going to laugh, for a second, before she leveled me with a very serious look and told me, “If you keep looking for places to overlap the pages of the past and the present you’re never going to move forward.”

I hadn’t . . . I think I’ve been doing that for awhile now. I mentioned Howard to Mr. Stark, have told Colonel Fury he reminds me of Colonel Phillips, and now said, offhandedly, that Natasha reminds me a bit of Peggy. 

She’s right. I can’t keep doing that. 

There’s this thing called a timeline, we used to use them to study history in school and had an assignment to make timelines of our lives so far. It works best that way, I think, if you mark time out in a single straight line rather than the loop and tumble it really is, especially for me. I can’t circle back to the 40’s, as much as I wish I could. So I’ll write my time out as a line. A line, straight like a road. You can’t connect the bricks at the beginning of the road with the ones at the end, that’s not how it works. You can look back over your shoulder an see them, stand in the middle and be able to glimpse both ends of the road as much as you’d like. But, at the end of the day, what use is going back to where you started?

I’ll keep looking back as much as I want, but I’ll cross one vertical mark through my timeline. A wall, a roadblock, a barrier. I can look over it but it’s too high to jump, too slick to climb, and secretly there’s nothing but a steep drop into nothing on the other side. 

The Traveler treated time like a circle, a path he could keep using over and over and end up home in time for dinner whenever he wanted to.

Time is a straight line.

Love, Steve


	5. The Lonely God

Dear Diary,

Natasha came again today. I’m 100% sure she reads this, but she hasn’t said anything specific so pointing fingers is pretty useless. Although she did mention that the best place to hide valuables is not under mattresses. I’d invest in a safe, except I don’t really care. Also, Clint said Natasha can break into a safe in less than thirty seconds as part of S.H.I.E.L.D. training. 

Today we took a walk. We steered pretty clear of Brooklyn, for that I’m thankful. I’d like to keep it the way it was when I left inside my head for as long as possible. Natasha says I’m deluding myself, and to just use Google Maps, whatever that is, but I think she understands. 

We sat for a long time in a little coffee shop outside of Stark Tower. It’s pretty impressive, really, that Mr. Stark has a tower. Natasha called it the “Tower of Compensation,” which is a bit rude, but I have to admit I laughed. 

“He must feel like a god,” I’d whispered, rather awed, “living up there, above his company and above the entire city, just looking down on it all. We’d look like ants.”

Natasha just looked at me before asking, “Would you?”

I had to think about that one, actually. If I was so high above it all that humanity looked like bugs to me, would I feel like a god, a king, an overlord?

No.

I told her as much. 

“No. If everyone else looked so small, but I was so big, even though I knew it was just an illusion of perspective and distance, I’d feel detached. Alone. Lonely.”

 _Oh_.

Natasha didn’t say anything in return, and simply nodded instead. It was then that I remembered that she was the one who wrote Mr. Stark’s official S.H.I.E.L.D. file. Things like that are what make me wonder what her motives are. Is she trying to get me to understand Tony for the team’s sake, general teamwork and camaraderie and all that? Or is she doing it for my own sake? Possibly even for Mr. Stark’s? She’s always so carefully composed, the perfect soldier and when she’s around Tony that carefully cut and pressed soldier image doesn’t change. She speaks out against him in snide, well wrought remarks, sometimes she threatens him with the hundreds of ways she could kill him with any object in the room. But, I think, sometimes I catch a glimpse of something else. I don’t know whether it was because she was tasked to observe him so closely and she feels an obligation to him, or whether she actually considers him to be a friend, but sometimes she pulls him aside and just talks to him. Maybe she scolds him, maybe she offers him advice. Whatever it is it’s not my business. She told me once she used to work for Mr. Stark., an experience which she mentioned with a rather grim look. From that alone I can surmise that it wasn’t the best of jobs, not that I’d expect it to be.

We stared up at Stark Tower for a long time in relative silence, heads tilted back and eyes trained on the penthouse that almost touched the clouds. Gods bear the burden of a lonely existence, even if they are just mortals pretending to be one if only because they’ve never known how, may have never been given the chance, to be anyone else.

Love, Steve


End file.
